Determinants of Adoption of Pond Fish Farming Innovations in Salamaua of Morobe Province in Papua New Guinea

Pond fish farming, introduced in the 1960s, remained an underdeveloped industry due to no policy support. About two decades ago, the industry was revived with emphases placed on smallholder production. Four fish production innovations were introduced, as a part of this program, to improve production and income of farmers and in the process, engage youth. This study, conducted at Salamaua, was aimed at determining the extent of and the factors that influence the adoption of four innovations disseminated. Thus, primary and secondary data collected were on the socioeconomic characteristics of the farmers, extent of innovation adoption and problem confrontation of farmers in adopting innovations. The pond liming and fertilizing innovation, which ranked number 1, was adopted by all the farmers followed by 56, 52 and 30 percent adoption for stock density, sampling and sexing and feed formulation in that order of ranking respectively. About 96 percent of the farmers categorized problems they faced as medium to high problems and ranked poor infrastructure as problem number 1 followed by lack of knowledge and skills, lack of marketing facilities, lack of extension contact, poor performance of fingerlings, and lack of local quality feed. Annual income and family size were the most important attributes influencing adoption and problem confrontation in adopting introduced innovations respectively. Although the innovations were disseminated to improve production and income of farmers, their dissemination was not adequately supported through farmer training and extension, market access and credit acquisition